On this day in 2009, Frank McCourt, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning, runaway best-seller \u201cAngela\u2019s Ashes,\u201d a 1996 memoir about his impoverished childhood in Limerick, Ireland, dies at age 78 in Manhattan from metastatic melanoma. McCourt wrote \u201cAngela\u2019s Ashes,\u201d his first book, when he was in his mid-60s, after teaching in New York City\u2019s public schools for nearly 30 years.<\/p>\n
Francis McCourt was born on August 19, 1930, in Brooklyn, New York, the oldest of seven children of Irish immigrants Angela and Malachy McCourt. In the midst of the Great Depression, 4-year-old Frank McCourt and his destitute family returned to his mother\u2019s native Limerick. There his drunken, irresponsible father squandered the money he earned from his occasional work as a laborer, while his family subsisted in squalid poverty in the slums of Limerick. Three of McCourt\u2019s siblings died in early childhood. When McCourt was 11, his father abandoned the family; at 13, the younger McCourt dropped out of school to work. As he would later write in \u201cAngela\u2019s Ashes\u201d: \u201cWhen I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: The happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
At age 19, McCourt moved to New York City, where he worked a series of manual-labor jobs. During the Korean War, he served in the U.S. Army, training German shepherds. Afterward, despite his lack of formal education, he attended New York University on the GI Bill, studying English and graduating in 1957. The following year, he embarked on a 30-year teaching career in New York City\u2019s public high schools. A popular, unorthodox teacher, he shared with his students some of the stories about his childhood that would later appear in \u201cAngela\u2019s Ashes.\u201d Along the way, he earned a master\u2019s degree in English from Brooklyn College.<\/p>\n
In the 1970s, McCourt and his brother Malachy, an actor and bartender, wrote and performed an autobiographical two-man show in New York, \u201cA Couple of Blaguards\u201d; they later took their show on the road to other cities. After Frank McCourt retired from teaching in 1987, he decided to write his childhood memoirs.<\/p>\n
When \u201cAngela\u2019s Ashes\u201d was published in 1996, it received rave reviews from critics (who praised McCourt\u2019s use of language and ability to write about his difficult childhood without bitterness) and went on to become a huge best-seller, with hardback sales alone topping 4 million copies. In 1997, the book won the Pulitzer Prize for biography or autobiography. \u201cAngela\u2019s Ashes\u201d was less warmly received by some in Ireland, where McCourt was criticized for tarnishing the reputation of his mother, the city of Limerick and the Catholic Church, which he portrayed in his book as repressive and unsympathetic.<\/p>\n
In 1999, \u201cAngela\u2019s Ashes\u201d was made into a Hollywood movie. That same year, McCourt published his second memoir, \u201c\u2019Tis,\u201d which picked up where \u201cAngela\u2019s Ashes\u201d left off and described his years in America. His third book, \u201cTeacher Man,\u201d about his experiences as an educator, followed in 2005.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On this day in 2009, Frank McCourt, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning, runaway best-seller \u201cAngela\u2019s Ashes,\u201d a 1996 memoir about his impoverished childhood in Limerick, Ireland, dies at age 78 in Manhattan from metastatic melanoma. McCourt wrote \u201cAngela\u2019s Ashes,\u201d his first book, when he was in his mid-60s, after teaching in New York City\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3513],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9420\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}